It started with a seven-year-old in a Pop Warner helmet, and a dad who couldn't stand the idea of missing a single moment.
When my son started playing Pop Warner football, I did what a lot of parents do — I stood on the sideline with my phone and came home with blurry, useless photos. That lasted about two weeks before I decided I needed a real camera. I picked up a Nikon D90 with the kit lens, an 18–105mm, and I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. But I had a kid running routes and making tackles, and I was going to figure it out.
Learning on the sideline
The D90 was a revelation — and also a humbling teacher. I learned quickly that a kit lens and youth football are not a great combination. The action is fast, the light on outdoor fields is uneven, and there's a lot of distance between the sideline and the play. I read everything I could find, asked questions online, and kept shooting.
The following year I splurged on a used 70–300mm. That felt like a superpower. Suddenly I could actually reach the action — pull my son out of a pile-up, freeze him mid-stride on a run. Those were the first photos I was genuinely proud of.
When he moved from football into basketball — first at the grammar school level, then in a local AAU league — I followed him there too. Indoor gyms introduced a whole new set of problems: worse light, faster movement, closer quarters. I moved from the D90 to the D7000, and eventually to the D7100. Each camera taught me something the previous one couldn't.
High school changes everything
By the time he hit high school — playing both basketball and football — I'd been at this for several years and I knew I was outgrowing the amateur tier. High school sports move differently. The athletes are faster, the stakes feel higher, and the moments you want to capture are harder to get to. I made the jump to the Nikon D5 and then the D850, and paired them with proper professional glass, including Nikon's 70–200mm zoom. It was the first time the gear felt like it was keeping up with what I was trying to do.
Four years of high school sports. Hundreds of games. Thousands of frames. I didn't know it at the time, but I was building something.
College, and the Z9
My son went off to college — a state school, close enough that I had no excuse not to keep showing up. And then he made the college football team and started all four years as a wide receiver. Most of the time, my seat wasn't in the stands — it was on the field, camera in hand, and now I had a real reason to push the gear as far as it would go.
I made the move to Nikon's mirrorless system, picking up the Z9 — their flagship — along with a set of S-series lenses. I also added the Nikon 200–500mm zoom, which gave me real reach on a college field. Along the way I've had the chance to shoot with the Nikon 400mm f/2.8 prime — the lens serious sports photographers reach for when nothing else will do — and the difference in speed and rendering is hard to overstate. The autofocus, the buffer, the image quality at distance — it was a different world from where I'd started with that D90 and a kit lens on a Pop Warner sideline.
Where I am now
My son graduated. He's done with organized football, and somewhere around his sophomore year I'd already started to pivot — finding my way into dance and event photography, drawn to the challenge of capturing movement and expression in completely different environments.
The weekends I used to spend on the road following a football schedule are now mine to use differently. And the gear, the eye, the patience — all of it that I built chasing one kid across fields and courts and gyms for almost two decades — turns out to translate pretty well to a stage.
I didn't set out to become a photographer. I set out to be a present parent. I'm glad those two things ended up being the same thing.